Obama's top-down grassroots army

President Barack Obama’s got a volunteer army — and all their marching orders come from carefully organized paid generals back at headquarters.

Obama won two terms by harnessing a grassroots movement through a tightly controlled, top-down campaign organization. Now the group formed out of Organizing for America is now bringing that approach to Organizing for Action.

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It’s what differentiates OFA from other grassroots groups, and even the Democratic National Committee: they’re combining large-dollar donations and unpaid local leaders for a carefully built, lasting structure that they believe will be just as effective in supporting the president as it was in electing him.

So far, OFA has alternated its agenda – a week on gun control, then a week on immigration, with some connection to Obama’s White House schedule. Starting next week, OFA will for the first time run concurrent national campaigns on gun control and immigration, blasting emails to supporters and holding local events.

Operating four campaigns allows OFA to target separate audiences, OFA executive director Jon Carson said, with different issues playing to disparate audiences. OFA has been particularly effective in drawing new volunteers in red states Obama didn’t contest in 2012, where would-be supporters now have an opportunity to work for the president in their communities.

“There’s a set of people whose passion is on gun violence. There are other people whose top passion is the budget fight or the sequester fight,” said. “We’re very, very happy with the level of engagement.”

Previously named Organizing for America, the group changed its name to Organizing for Action when it remade itself after the 2012 election. Though just a few months old, OFA already has local chapters with volunteer state directors in 42 of 50 states. They’ve each got groups of regional and local leader volunteers working under them, planning actions and events to support Obama’s agenda.

But everything they do is managed straight out of headquarters — they’re the only ones who get to call the shots, and they’re the only ones with access to the Obama data trove, including the 17 million-name email list.

Through regular conference calls and briefing memos, OFA’s leadership of paid, experienced operatives directs volunteer leaders in the states detailing what issues the organization will tackle and strategy will be. They tell the state OFA leadership how to hold sessions for new recruits on basics like organizing events, attracting new members, working with like-minded groups and even pitching stories about events to local reporters.

“They are just thrilled to have a chance to work in their own backyard,” Carson told POLITICO. “The reason people were on the campaign, the reason people came to this president in the first place I think our volunteers, they just get it.”

A separate policy development team also determines the issues for them back at headquarters: campaign directors in place for each of the four issues that the president has set as second term priorities — gun control, immigration reform, environmental protection and the economy.

“The time to act is now, and people are using what they learned in the campaign, grassroots campaign technology, to all push for some commonsense pieces of legislation, and actions, that can make our country better,” said Jim Messina, the Obama 2012 campaign manager and OFA chair, in an interview to air Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” online “Press Pass.”